Executive Action

David Miller's 1973 film is the first Hollywood conspiracy account of the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The screenplay was written by Dalton Trumbo, Mark Lane and Donald Freed; it was Trumbo's last, and a blacklisted writer closing his career on this subject sums up the film's political position. Men with intelligence backgrounds played by Burt Lancaster and Robert Ryan plan the killing together with right-wing politicians and business interests. The film narrates a hypothesis about how the assassination happened as though it happened; it is fiction, not document, and worth holding as such. The telling is deliberately cold: meeting rooms, maps, quiet decisions. Weaving real news footage through the fiction is a method Oliver Stone would repeat at far greater scale in JFK in 1991. It opened in November 1973, on the tenth anniversary of the assassination, and was among Robert Ryan's last films. Who it's for: viewers interested in political conspiracy thrillers and in the vein of institutional distrust running through 1970s American cinema. Who it's not for: anyone wanting established history, or troubled by conspiracy fiction presented in a documentary register.